


And the Meek Shall Inherit

by vuas



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:32:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vuas/pseuds/vuas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That night, Bond dreams of soft, blonde children laughing across the moors, running in curious circles, a game of endless tag. Skyfall is warm and not so empty, and he almost, almost gets to touch the dark-haired, sleeping woman on the couch.</p><p>(Or the one in which James finds his estranged daughter)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Playing around with a few ideas concerning Casino Royale and Skyfall. Maybe something longer eventually, if I can dig up a plot.

"And no leads on who she is?"

"Not a single one. She doesn't register on any of the facial recognition databases; we contacted the Americans and the Turks. Nobody knows."

Bond stares at the grainy image. The blonde girl is merely a wisp of a figure, standing over 005's dead body, his dark blood on her hands.

* * *

 

It feels like chance, when he spots her out of the corner of his eye in Istanbul. Her hair floats over her shoulders. It helps that she's wearing the very same jacket as in the security footage.

He chases, she runs.

* * *

 

The leap into the wide river is definitely not something he'd planned for. But she's already a dark shape beneath the water, and he has to find her. He has to.

(The sense of nostalgia is so intense it causes him physical pain.)

* * *

 

Her name, when he drags her out, soaking wet and coughing, is Sophia Lynd. She is seventeen years old. She has blonde hair, stuck out ears, and blue eyes. Her face shape and eyebrows are her mother's.

* * *

 

She looks very small, somehow, sitting in the interrogation room. A doctor sits inside, trying to coerce her into conversation. Sophia has not spoken a word since they left Istanbul.

(He finds himself rooting for her.)

* * *

 

Q's face is one part shocked and one part tired. He is holding a tablet beneath his arm. He shows it to Bond and M, and says things about DNA and old records of a dead woman. Bond is not listening. He's looking at the line of this tiny force of world-tumbling anger's shoulders and the unamused expression on her face. It's impossible; it has to be.

(She's flippant, and says to the doctor, "It's funny how you think I want to talk to you.")

* * *

 

They had lived together for ten years in a house far from any city, Sophia was sure it was France. A man would come with groceries once a week. Her mother barely spoke. Vesper Lynd could wash sheets and cook dinner but a real conversation was out of the question. Sophia played with the dogs. Mum cried once when Sophia nearly made it to the closest neighbors after walking about all day.

(It's all impossible; he held her while she died, her heart fluttering around in her ribcage. He remembers someone pulling him away and into an ambulance, but he'd been so sure.

M would have never lied about this to him.)

* * *

 

That night, Bond dreams of soft, blonde children laughing across the moors, running in curious circles, a game of endless tag. Skyfall is warm and not so empty, and he almost, almost gets to touch the dark-haired, sleeping woman on the couch.

(The moors flood and he wakes up drenched in his own sweat. He couldn't save the children, they didn't know how to swim.)

* * *

 

Sophia was a chip in a card game; she'd been blessed with the grace of two beautiful people, the steady hands on a killer and the smile of a ghost. A man named Jacques spun lies into her head every night. And the next morning, told her to shoot someone in the head.

There was blood on her hands. She was only fifteen.

* * *

 

Sophia was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his (supposedly secure) flat when he returned, grilled cheese in one hand and his (supposedly secure) laptop in the other. Her face is blank but her body language dares him to pick a fight. He walks past her, ignoring the ploy for a confrontation, and into the kitchenette to find a goey grilled cheese left waiting.

"I didn't make those for you." her voice floats from the living room.

"I didn't say you did."

* * *

 

Her mother had warm hands and cooked the best grilled cheese. Bedtime stories were about brave, loyal knights, who were silly enough to stand out from the rest. They took chances and swung swords and fought fearlessly.

(There were never any princesses. It was not that kind of story.)

* * *

  
Sophia understands that Jacques's plan is in the palm of her hand. Her hand, wrapped around a gun, shoots his companions.

Jacques twists the knife between her ribs and the air in her lungs is expelled rather violently. It hurts, it burns too deeply. There are pennies in her mouth and salt poured into her side. The ground is desperate to hold her, and she lets it, knees buckling.

The next time she's vaguely aware of her surroundings, someone is holding her aching hand. They are warm. She wants grilled cheese.

* * *

  
Bond is so vehement about Sophia not being recruited he nearly flips M's desk. Which would be unfortunate, because there was a lot of paperwork there. (M is slightly disappointed 007 restrains himself. Nobody likes paperwork, even for queen and country.)

She hisses "You're not my father. You don't get to call yourself that," when they pass each other in the lobby. She is rather beautiful when furious. He has seen women like that before. They make excellent agents.

* * *

 

"He told me she was sick. In the hospital. I believed him then, I was little and he was my world. I think maybe he did it himself one night. I remember them shouting. She'd seen something about MI6 in the news, mumbling about how she had to find you. Jacques didn't like that very much."

A beat.

"I'm glad I shot him and I'm happy he's dead. But I think she'd hate us both, really."

They don't speak for a long time. She falls asleep on the couch, curled in on herself and away from the world. Bond drinks until the sun peaks through the curtains.

"Quite the opposite," he whispers, eyes bloodshot. Nobody hears.

(The flat creaks, and James chalks it up to a ghost)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These two have been swimming around in my brain again. Mainly more of a character study, set several years after the first chapter. I have more written, but unfinished, I'll see if I can work on it sometime soon.

Her blood is in her mouth (oh god please let all her teeth be intact) and someone else’s blood all over her shirt (this was the nice linen one from last season-she wasn’t going to be able to find it again, dammit) when she’s shoving coins into a payphone somewhere in Ukraine. It’s December and it’s freezing cold, and a call to the UK is going to be expensive as _hell_ , and she hadn’t really figured out how to write expense reports yet-

Q answers the phone.

She is seventeen, and her name is 003.

* * *

 

She’s shoved her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, ducking past Medical because her teeth were intact and that was really all she had been worried about. She’s fingering the card she’s got for the tube and a paperclip, and fights a smile when she thinks about MacGyver.

She places the thumbdrive on Q’s desk and attempts to saunter out again, not unnoticed by various minions but at least unbothered.

Q sharply calls the number she doesn’t react to quickly enough yet, and she pretends she hadn’t heard him as she wanders out of Q-Branch, following her feet.

* * *

 

Her feet take her to a nice bar a few streets over-it’s only noon, and the bartender gives her a funny look but pours amber liquid into a glass anyway, and leaves her well alone because she’s got the darkest of her “fuck off” faces on.

She runs her fingers of her right hand over the knuckles of her left, absorbed in the stinging sensation as the skin is red, irritated, and threatening to openly bleed again. It’s a combination of punching a man’s teeth out and then dragging her hand against uneven pavement to scramble for any weapon at all.

Better his teeth than hers, she thinks, and lets the Jameson burn her throat.

* * *

 

Her tiny flat is empty and dark and musky, and knowing this she doesn’t go back until she’s drunk enough to pass out. She sleeps for twelve hours before cooking eggs (and then feeling too sick to eat them) and drinking orange juice (well, vodka with orange juice. Without much orange juice) and mainly everything is just sore, because the long plane ride after being injured hadn’t helped at all.

She showers, which stings a lot and so much pink circles the drain that she gets out early, feeling ill. Dressing is less difficult, though jeans take longer to put on than usual.

She pops three times the expected dosage of painkillers and makes her way back to MI6 for debriefing.

* * *

 

She’s blinking at fluorescent lighting and is so bored her eyes are rotting in her skull. She can feel them withering away to nothing, her very molecules vibrating away.

M is speaking, and she’s supposed to be listening, and a part of her is-but most of her brain is screaming, _I beat him to death with a crowbar, until chunks of him flew off, until he was unidentifiable and cold, and I did it because you told me to._

She’s running the fingers of her right hand over the knuckles of her left.

* * *

 

Her father is outside when she’s dismissed, and frankly, seeing him startles her. He is returning her guarded look, and Moneypenny watches the exchange from her desk with some interest.

They haven’t seen each other in almost two months, though it’s not like they had plans. She nods and sweeps past him, and he does the same, and they are stuck back, well, into whatever the hell their relationship was.

* * *

 

(A year ago M offered her the job and a childish part of her had taken it out of spite- _HA, want to care about me? I’d like to see you try and get attached when you know I’m doing this-)_

(She has killed five people in the name of a Queen, in the name of a Country she doesn’t belong in. She’s murdered people, watched them squirm until they went still, some bloody, like Ukraine, and some quick, just eyelids flickering a few times, like in Bosnia.)

(She is so sick.)

* * *

 

She vomits in a bathroom five minutes later, because the image of the Ukrainian man had burned into her eyelids and she was never going to sleep again and oh, why the fuck did she have vodka for breakfast.

Moneypenny leaves a manila folder with details for the next mission on the counter next to the soap.

* * *

 

Q hands her a gun, and tells her to practice before she flies out in a week. Something about the weight needed to be tinkered with before it was put out in the field.

She shoots one hundred rounds into a cardboard man yards and yards away, and a minion behind her scribbles intensely at a digital screen. She asks him what he’s looking for, but he has earplugs in and doesn’t hear her.

* * *

 

The plane is quiet-it’s about 3 am on an overnight flight to America, and she’s bouncing her knee, waiting for the attendant to serve her another vodka with lime. She’s straining her eyes out into the darkness of beyond the window, but it’s just the ocean somewhere down there, vast and unyielding and so so dark.

(How many bodies lie at the bottom of the ocean?)

(How many has your father put there?)

* * *

 

She has to use a serrated kitchen knife to kill the target, and it takes a while.

* * *

 

(It’s because she can’t bring herself to do it with bare hands.)

(She could, though. For the record.)

* * *

 

She dumps the body in a river because Q had frantically called her and told her to run to Canada, trying to explain that something had happened with the CIA and they weren’t cooperating anymore, and there would be no cleanup crew.

She wipes the blood off the counter with paper towels that have pastel daisies on them, and she’s trying to be quiet because there’s children sleeping upstairs, and if they wake up she’ll have to kill them too.

* * *

 

She loses some indeterminate amount of time staring at a ceramic mug in her hand. It says: “Jazz festival 1993” on it with a stylized cello beneath. It’s chipped and the paint on the bottom rim is flaking off.

The first dregs of light breach the window and someone’s alarm goes off upstairs; she slips out the back door and sprints for the tree line, towards the half of the sky that was still dark.

* * *

 

She’s stuck in Quebec until Q can make her a fake passport and find someone who’ll keep their mouth shut to print it. She eats at a little café a block from the hotel every morning and reads the paper. There’s a lot of unrest in Ukraine.

(She is so damn insignificant after all.)

* * *

 

The passport _looks_ real and makes her palms sweat but she smiles shyly at security and looks innocuous as possible, sipping coffee in the waiting area at the International gates.

The flight back is another red-eye, and she spends it all staring out the window as they try to outrun the sunlight. It’s raining when they arrive in London, and someone punches her in the face while she’s struggling with the wet, slippery keys to the front door of her flat.

* * *

 

She’s positively vicious fighting back because _fuck you, fucking asshole_ and gives chase when the attacker tries to back off. They end up running a few blocks down to the docks and then into the Thames, and she drowns him without thinking about it too hard.

His body floats face down, his clothes water logged. She treads water, coughing and spitting up the fluid trapped in her lungs before climbing out.

* * *

 

She coughs the entire way to MI6 a few hours later- after a warm shower-but can’t stop shivering. She is unceremoniously dragged to medical when she can’t get words out to tell them what happened because she’s either coughing or chattering her teeth.

Pneumonia, and it’s awful and she’s so cold.

* * *

 

She ends up at her Father’s flat, because the heater’s broken in hers (also, someone knows where she lives). He sighs and lets her in, (trying to discretely let a woman out a few minutes later when he thinks Sophia isn’t paying attention- how scandalous).

“Two weeks of rest? They must think you’re close to death.” He’s leaning against the kitchen counter, a drink in hand.

She’s sitting in his sweatshirt, curled on the couch, scrubbing at her red face. “Apparently.” Is the all she has energy to say, because she’s really tired-

* * *

 

She sleeps for two weeks because she can _(could sleep forever, but that's dangerous, dangerous, dangerous_ ). She and Bond quietly occupy the same space for the time being. She figures out how to work the coffee maker, vows the first night not to drink his alcohol if she’s actually this sick and tired, breaking the rule two hours later with a gin and tonic.

The glass clinks when someone cleans it up, but she’s too tired to open her eyes and see who it is.

(God, she wants to hate him because it would be easy-but he keeps being every bit the man she needs him to be, doing things like that, and it’s so _hard._ )

* * *

 

Her personal universe has changed many times over since they first met.

She used to be brave-or at least unfraid; of the world, of people, of dying. Now she is _terrified_. A better agent though, because she is reckless and will fight tooth and nail, because she knows there are people who will smash her into little gritty bits with a crowbar if they could.

The drinking, she will admit, has gotten out of control (but out of control is something she can handle now. And it’s better than anything else, really, and she doesn’t even want to think about what the anything else is.)

She’s lying on his couch. The fireplace is on, spreading warmth. Bond is shuffling around his kitchen, cooking something.

She’s running the fingers of her right hand over the knuckles of her left.

(it takes her a very long time to notice she’s bleeding)

* * *

 

It goes like this:

Several summers ago, back when her hair had been long and she had a dog and a mother, she’d climbed a tree. When she got to the top, precariously perched on two thin branches that swayed in the wind, Sophia remembered that she had to get back down.

She falls, of course, and the broken arm results in a lot of pain but not a lot of crying because crying is for _babies_.

She is ten, and staring at her miserable face in the mirror, arm covered in plaster.

* * *

 

It also goes like this:

(Many years ago, back when his hair had been sun bleached and his knees scraped, he climbed into the loft of the old barn. When he got to the roof by scrambling through a hole in the rafters, James remembered he had to get back down.)


End file.
